Brooklyn's Baddest

We've all heard of cops gone bad, cops on the take. But the tale that's come out of New York lately is of an entirely different order: Louis Scarcella, a star detective now accused of putting away innocent people, over decades, on false charges, by whatever means necessary—forced confessions, witness tampering, and a total disregard for justice. If he did half the things he's accused of, then we have a new definition of rogue cop

It was a gift, the way he could get bad guys to open up. "Really good detectives," he said once, "are born with this sixth sense, that crystal ball in their stomach. It's having the ability to get inside that person's soul whatever way you can and get the person to say what you need to hear." What else could explain it? Sometimes a case would come along and a whole squad of detectives would work it. But after months: cold as stone. And then Louis Scarcella would show up, find an accomplice, charm a witness, and—bang, just like that—a killer got locked up. A lot of killers. So many killers it's tough to remember. "I don't know how many homicides I caught," he says now. "Some people say 140, some say 170, some say over 200. I really don't know how many." It doesn't matter. Catch that many killers, and they're all just statistics. What matters is how good the detective is, and everyone knew Louis Scarcella was the best.

In 1973, when Scarcella was sworn in, 1,680 people were murdered in New York City, and about as many were killed the next year and the year after that, all through the '70s and into the '80s. And then crime got really bad, and Bernie Goetz shot those kids on the subway, and the Central Park jogger got raped and beaten nearly to death, and the New York Post screamed DAVE, DO SOMETHING! on the front page, meaning Dinkins, the mayor. The murders peaked in 1990, at 2,245—almost seven times as many as in 2013—and didn't start to dip until 1995, when Scarcella was five years out from his pension.

He is 62 years old now, with a heavy brow and shaggy hair that's only beginning to thin. He's fit and trim, muscles ropy under the tattoos staining his arms, and he still keeps a duplicate of his gold shield, which has the same number as his father's gold shield, in his pocket. He doesn't look like what the papers are calling him, a rogue. When he left the job, he was as famous as a street cop can get, because he broke some of the most heinous cases in a city that stratified crime between horrific and merely appalling.

He remembers those cases, the flashy ones that leapt out from the background drone of routine slaughter. The ones he put on his résumé. There was the subway clerk blown up by kids who squirted gasoline through the token-booth slot. That was a big story, a national story, because it was like a scene in a movie called Money Train, and it gave Bob Dole, who was running for president, an opportunity to grouse about how Hollywood was ruining America. He remembers the world-famous dancer, stabbed three times in the chest by a burglar, a grotesque symbol of New York's descent into chaos. Took him a few months, but he got that guy, too.

And the rabbi. That case made Scarcella's name. Chaskel Werzberger survived the Holocaust only to get shot in the face in Williamsburg in 1990. A robbery went bad, the thief panicked and jacked Werzberger's station wagon to get away, killed him in the street. Dozens of detectives worked that case for weeks, got nothing but dead ends. Six months later, Scarcella and his partner found two men who said they were accomplices, and they fingered a guy named David Ranta as the shooter. Scarcella spent hours with Ranta, coaxing. "You're Italian, I'm Italian," Scarcella finally said. "This is your chance to tell me. Tell me what happened." Scarcella wrote a confession for Ranta on the only thing he had, a manila file folder.

Scarcella got the Chief of Detectives' Award for Outstanding Police Investigation for each of those cases. "He is one of the best at getting even the worst villains to talk," Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Mike McAlary wrote in the Daily News in 1996. "The good detectives are like that. Their ability [to] talk to people make them legendary. In big cases, they bring in Scarcella." He was a legend. He retired a legend. And he probably would have died a legend, too.

But then, in the spring of 2013, something unusual happened: David Ranta was let out of prison.

What made Ranta's release so extraordinary was that prosecutors asked a judge to let him go. In March 2013, after two decades of fighting appeals, district attorneys in Kings County re-evaluated whether Ranta ever should've been locked up. And they decided no, he should not have spent twenty-three years in prison, should not have been torn away from his family, should not have lost the prime of his life, for a crime he almost certainly had nothing to do with.

Twenty-three years after the fact, a witness said a detective (he did not say which detective) had told him to "pick the guy with the big nose" from a lineup. One of the alleged accomplices, a convicted rapist, says he lied to get a break on his own legal troubles. He says the other accomplice, a junkie with five open robbery cases, lied, too. Take away those witnesses, and all that's left is a confession that Ranta has always insisted he never made; he says he signed the file folder with his purported statement on it when it was blank, thinking it was a form that would allow him to make a phone call.

Ranta's release was a big story, maybe bigger, even, than Scarcella arresting him. The City of New York agreed to pay Ranta $6.4 million before he even had a chance to sue.

And Ranta was only the beginning. Other inmates were insisting they, too, had never made confessions Scarcella attributed to them. Reporters for TheNew York Times burrowed into moldering court records and discovered that several purported confessions began with curiously similar language, such as "You got it right" or "I was there." They also found that one crackhead prostitute had been a key witness, often the only witness, in six Scarcella cases. In May 2013, faced with that revelation, the D.A.'s office announced it would review fifty-seven trial convictions of inmates arrested by Scarcella.

Scarcella was stunned. He'd been retired nearly fourteen years, living a quiet life on Staten Island, and prosecutors—people who used to be on his side!—were second-guessing arrests he'd made in a long-ago New York that most people either can't imagine or want to forget. He swore he never framed anyone, never faked a confession. Technically, he never put anyone in prison, either: Prosecutors presented evidence and judges enforced the rules and juries rendered verdicts.

"I have to be a pretty smart guy to lock someone up, get it through the D.A.'s office, get it through a trial and jury, and convict a guy," he told the Times. "I'm not that smart. It's not a Louie Scarcella show."

···

On a bright afternoon in April, Derrick Hamilton stood at the foot of the stairs of New York City Hall. Hamilton is a two-time ex-con, once for manslaughter and once for second-degree murder. Behind him on the stairs, crowded to the top and spanning half the portico, were other ex-cons and the friends and relatives of still-cons. Most of them wore baseball caps Hamilton had passed out earlier: black with white stitching that, above the bill, read wrongfully convicted and, on the right temple, victims of detective scarcella. Not all of the cases represented on the steps were Scarcella's, but his was the only name on the hats.

April 9 was a tough day for Scarcella. That morning's Times teased another story, on the front page, about someone he'd arrested—the thirty-fourth the paper had published since March 2013 related explicitly or in part to Scarcella. The rally, meant to prod the new Kings County D.A. to quicken his review of Scarcella cases and about thirty others, was organized by Lonnie Soury, a consultant who works on wrongful convictions and false confessions.

"Former Brooklyn detective Louis Scarcella," Soury said, "is a symptom of a deadly disease." The problem wasn't one detective, he argued, but the sprawling system that supported and rewarded him.

When he finished, Soury introduced Hamilton. "They ask us to wait," Hamilton said from the base of the steps. "How long can we wait for justice?"

Hamilton has been waiting more than twenty-three years, since Scarcella arrested him in March 1991. Granted, Hamilton was not an upstanding citizen. "Not only was I a bad guy," he told me. "I was a stupid guy." He was on parole for manslaughter—bumped down on appeal from second-degree murder—because he'd been the lookout in a robbery that went bad in the Lafayette Gardens projects. LG, for short. On January 3, 1991, he was violating that parole by being out of state. He had business in New Haven, Connecticut, a hair salon he co-owned, and a social affair, a going-away party for a friend headed to prison for drugs. The next morning, a man named Nathaniel Cash was shot dead in Brooklyn. Another guy, Money Will—possibly one of the shooters—told everyone who came to gawk at the body that Hamilton did it. Cash's girlfriend said so, too. This in spite of the fact that eight witnesses, including a former New Haven cop, swear Hamilton was still in Connecticut. The girlfriend tried to take it back (she'd initially told police she hadn't seen the killing), but she was threatened with perjury and jail, so she told a grand jury Hamilton murdered Cash.